4 Benefits of Moving Business Intelligence to the Cloud

In some ways, the more business data you collect, the more accurate your analysis will be. More accurately, though, the better you can pinpoint the data, the better your analysis. You should look into whatever strategies and technology you can incorporate to make business intelligence easier and more precise. Moving data to the cloud and operating your data collection and analysis through a cloud-based software is one such valuable strategy.

Familiarizing Yourself With the Cloud

Graduate-level studies related to data collection will teach you analysis and operation in the cloud. If your classes are online, you can easily continue to work full time and do your coursework whenever you find it most convenient — before work, late at night or while commuting on public transportation. Your professors are up to date with the latest in the role of cloud-based storage in business intelligence, and they will teach you how to apply it to your business.

You can learn the best methods of analyzing data and incorporate new technology effectively by earning a master’s in business intelligence. Encourage your employees and colleagues to do the same. The more experience you have with running sample data through a cloud-based network during your courses, the faster and more accurately you can analyze and collect data for your business at work.

1. Easy Access

With all of your data on the cloud, key employees will have easy access, whether they’re spread across the country or even the globe. Access business data on tablets and smartphones as you stroll through shipping warehouses or storefronts and connect the actual product being sold to the data you hold in your hand. Of course, the data remains secure in the cloud through passwords, pre-approved IDs and encryption.

2. Automatic Backup

When you collect data in software outside of the cloud, it’s up to you to back up the data in the event of disaster. For example, a natural disaster might destroy your office building, or on a smaller scale, a robbery might occur or your building might flood. A computer virus might attack your network and wipe out your data. When the data is stored remotely in a secure cloud network, it remains intact even if your servers go down — and the cloud server backs up the data automatically.

3. Effective Organization

Combine cloud storage with a project management program and you achieve even more efficient organization. Since multiple people need to access the data to input new data or analyze the existing data, your cloud-based business intelligence will keep track of who adds what and when.

When a new day’s sales are uploaded to the cloud, the data analysts at headquarters can easily see what’s new and will even receive alerts depending on the program and your selected settings. Similarly, when a salesperson makes a presentation to investors and a potential client asks to see charts reporting sales figures, the salesperson can bring up the cloud-based network and easily find where the ready-to-display charts are.

4. Less Wasted Time

When you task employees with data collection and analysis, you keep them occupied for much, if not all, of the work day. Since cloud-based business intelligence makes it easy to organize, access and backup sales data and projections, it requires less human input and takes less of your employees’ time. The less time they spend on tasks that cloud-based intelligence can do for them, the more time they have to be doing even more productive things for the company.

If you’ve heard about moving business intelligence to the cloud, you’ve been paying attention to business trends. According to Forbes, 36 percent of companies already have adopted the cloud data analysis and storage model, with more businesses looking into switching over every day. Cloud-based business intelligence has the distinction of being both proven in the organizations that have tried it and also still innovative, at the forefront of the business intelligence industry. Try it out at your business or organization today.

About the Author: Clifford Tynes is a business owner with an advanced degree in business intelligence.